Apache DocumentRoot & Directory Permissions

Question

Folks,
I am trying to use a unique directory for personal web services. So I have modified the following two lines in
/private/etc/httpd/http.conf
#DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"
DocumentRoot "/Users/rsp/Documents/web-maritime-new"
#<Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents">
<Directory "/Users/rsp/Documents/web-maritime-new">
After restarting the server, I get the following error message when I try to access any of the pages:
"Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /index.htm on this server.
Apache/1.3.33 Server at rspg5.local Port 80"
The permissions on the two directories and the files look the same to me when I use Get Info, or LS.
Does anyone have any ideas?
rich

Answer 1

I am no expert on this, but have you taken heed of the warning in http.conf to not make changes in it based only on the comments it includes but to understand what they mean before making changes? (Presumably, this means reading the manual included with the Apache distribution, or the equivalent.)
Anyway, to my very limited understanding of this, the permissions required for access are not the regular ones of the OS per se, but those controlled by Apache for clients of the server. IOW, when using a browser to access these files/folders, you are doing so as a client of the server in your Mac, not as a local user of the Mac.
I don't think changing the root directory for documents to a location inside a user folder is a good idea, since this would (even if it worked) restrict access to it to that user. If all you want is to modify the index, why not do so in place, by modifying the index.html.en (or whatever language version(s) you want served) to include an alias to the desired Documents folder?
Better still, use the ~/Sites folder for whatever documents you want to serve.